Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov was a Soviet general practitioner who took part in the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1960–1961. He was the only doctor stationed at the Novolazarevskaya Station and, while there, developed appendicitis, which meant he had to perform an appendectomy on himself, a famous case of self-surgery. Leonid Rogozov was born in Dauriya Station, Chita Oblast, a remote […]
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How Climate Change Could Affect Our Diet Climate change and a shopping list? At first glance, it seems just a wrong correlation. Well, it is not! Climate change is already affecting our present and it will heavily influence our future. The extreme weather conditions brought by climate change are progressively increasing the risk of drought, floods, heat waves and wildfires, […]
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Annual global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels could drop slightly in 2015, according to a report from the Global Carbon Project led by a Stanford University researcher. This surprising result contrasts with the rapid growth in emissions before 2014, underlining the need for action to stabilize and permanently lower global CO2 emissions, the researchers conclude. “In 2014, global CO2 […]
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“Knowing what a chicken looks like and what all the chickens before it looked like doesn’t help us to understand the egg,” says Taras Gerya. The ETH Professor of Geophysics uses this metaphor to address plate tectonics and the early history of the Earth. The Earth’s lithosphere is divided into several plates that are in constant motion, and today’s geologists […]
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The Japanese whaling fleet is reportedly heading into the seas around Antarctica, drawing widespread condemnation from campaigners. Japan’s fleet of six ships left the port of Shimonoseki, western Japan with a quota of 940 minke whales and 10 fin whales. Calls for the Australian government to intervene have been rejected by the environment minister, Senator Ian Campbell. Japan’s whaling program, […]
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The North Atlantic Ocean is responding rapidly to climate change: it has absorbed 50% more carbon from human activities in the last 10 years,than in the previous decade, a new study shows. In effect, it has become both a sink for the byproduct of the fossil fuel combustion that is driving global warming, and at the same time an index of the […]
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Studies show that the oceans are warming, and Antarctica’s ice is melting. Now there is a new area where the ice is melting, Greenland’s ice sheets. It shows that southwest Greenland’s ice sheets are melting at an alarming rate. They have been melting at about 4 times the rate that was researched in 2003. Research showed that this area was […]
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For the first time, a mission designed to set its eyes on black holes and other objects far from our solar system has turned its gaze back closer to home, capturing images of our sun. NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has taken its first picture of the sun, producing the most sensitive solar portrait ever taken in high-energy […]
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“The Chinese need to learn that public spaces aren’t garbage dumps”, said Raymond Zhou. During a recent national holiday, visitors dropped a staggering 32 tons of litter in Tiananmen Square in just four days. Beijing’s army of street cleaners rushed in and quickly cleaned up the mess. But large areas of the country don’t have those resources, and by the […]
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People always wonder how the moon was made. The birth of the planets 4.5 billion years ago was extremely violent. They grew to full size by absorbing rival planet embryos in a series of titanic collisions—one of which probably gave Earth its moon (below). The moon’s large size, low density, and other features suggest that it emerged from an explosion […]
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